THE KEY THAT FITS THE LOCK

“A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key.”
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

St. Peter is the recipient and bearer of Christ’s keys! It is less out of laziness and more out of a desire to share a more sustained passage from his powerful pen that I pass the word to G.K. Chesterton, my mentor and friend as he reflects on a key image (pardon the pun!):

“The Early Christian was very precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key. It was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept along with it similar or dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement…It definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as you please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty.

The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness…

Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary…It either fits the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simple key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar.

And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and corners. The problem itself was a complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve anything so simple as sin…What it did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex, indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.” -G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925)

[To learn more about Chesterton visit www.Chesterton.org and discover his multifaceted genius!]

As a priest and pastor of souls, I have been entrusted with various keys to carry out my duty. The keys weigh but they also work to open doors! The bulge of keys in my pocket that represent a mix of responsibility, access and authority are a jingling reminder of Christ’s own gift to Peter and through him to the Church.

~Fr. Howe, Pastor